Last week, video of Sacramento Baptist preacher Roger Jimenez spewing hateful anti-homosexual rhetoric in a sermon appeared on the church’s YouTube channel. In the video, he talked about lining gay people up against the wall to be murdered—because the Bible. In this sense, Pastor Roger Jimenez is exactly like any and all religious extremists. Mr. Jimenez is a young buck in the world of hate preaching, but he’s getting his glorious 15 minutes of fame right now.
Nearly a thousand people from across California flooded the Natomas office park housing Verity Baptist Church on Sunday with rainbow flags and megaphones to protest the pastor who last week delivered an inflammatory sermon praising the massacre of LGBT people in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Fla.
John Hayden held back tears as he thanked the crowd for its support. He said the protest grew from a personal event for himself and his friends to the hundreds-strong crowd at a rate he’s never seen before from the LGBT community.
People from all walks of life, from all religions (including Pastor Jimenez’s alleged Christianity) were there to protest.
Cindy Roose, 63, who described herself as a heterosexual grandmother of 10, said she bypassed her own church service Sunday morning to come out for the rally.
“I have no problem with the congregation,” she said while the service was still going on. “I have a direct problem with a preacher who is preaching hate from the pulpit. A person who is supposed to be a leader of a church, who is supposed to be a man of God; it’s just unimaginable today.”
The protestors chalked out 49 bodies with the names of those who died in Orlando last weekend. Ms. Roose joined other protestors who laid down to create those chalk outlines. If there is a God and a heaven, when Cindy Roose shows up, God Himself will let her play with the remote control.